Depends if you want your cat to get chronic kidney disease and or diabetes. If you don’t care about that, then dry food is exceptionally inexpensive… Although if you end up caring about them in the end, the special food you will need once they have kidney problems will far out way the savings.
Cats should be eating almost all wet food.
Dogs just love people. If some rich asshole has the money to spoil their dog… the dog ain’t going to care what wages their current care taker is being paid. I fail to see how this is a negative for the dogs life, on average a dogs life will be significantly worse in the hands of someone with much less money.